Here’s a good article about security in Apache HBase that I think some readers will love.

Apache HBase is a non-relational database for Hadoop.

The article is written by Andrew Purtell, HBase Committer and member of the Intel HBase Team. Here’s an excerpt:

For some time Apache HBase has offered a strong security model based on Kerberos authentication and access control lists (ACLs). When Yahoo first made a version of Hadoop capable of strong authentication available in 2009, my team and I at a former employer, a commercial computer security vendor, were very interested. We needed a scale out platform for distributed computation, but we also needed one that could provide assurance against access of information by unauthorized users or applications.

Secure Hadoop was a good fit. We also found in HBase a datastore that could scale along with computation, and offered excellent Hadoop integration, except first we needed to add feature parity and integration with Secure Hadoop. Our work was contributed back to Apache as HBASE-2742 and ZOOKEEPER-938. We also contributed an ACL-based authorization engine as HBASE-3025, and the coprocessor framework upon which it was built as HBASE-2000 and others. As a result, in the Apache family of Big Data storage options, HBase was the first to offer strong authentication and access control. These features have been improved and evolved by the HBase community many times over since then.